August 1, 2006

Final thoughts on OSCON – with video

The eighth annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a half day of talks and a farewell address by Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, on the importance of software licenses. Moglen’s talk provided a perfect end to an excellent conference.

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Just before the Ubuntu Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Thursday, I sat down with Jeff Waugh to talk about what’s going to be in the upcoming Ubuntu release, codenamed Edgy Eft, scheduled for October of this year.Edgy may not be quite as edgy as one might expect. Waugh says that “a lot of [developers] want to work on infrastructure stuff and cleanups. There’s going to be a bunch of things related to testing and debugging.” That’s not to say there will be no new features in Edgy — Waugh says that Xen will be going in to Edgy — but a lot of the focus is going into testing support and language support for the upcoming release.

Waugh says GNOME is also undergoing a cleanup release, which means that it will also be “unedgy” for Ubuntu, but it will see a great deal of performance work — so users should see better performance in GNOME on Edgy. He also says that Evolution is undergoing some interesting development, and the next release should allow users to run separate Evolution components rather than the monolithic application. This is good news for those of us who would like a high-quality calendar application without having to deal with Evolution for mail.

Waugh also says that Scott James Remnant is working on a new init system for Edgy. Waugh says the Ubuntu team is not interested in the whole “let’s go parallel with the init stuff,” like InitNG, but instead to “clean it up, so it’s actually a nice system.” Though the focus is not performance, per se, Waugh says the init system in Edgy should be faster.